Wayback Machine

The Wayback Machine is the Internet Archive project discussed in News sites are blocking access to Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine. The episode describes it as sending crawlers to capture snapshots of web pages, creating a historical record used by readers, researchers, and journalists.

The episode’s new tension is that some news publishers are blocking the Wayback Machine because they worry AI companies could use archived copies of copyrighted journalism for model training. Andrew Deck says this is mostly preemptive and not tied, in the source, to direct evidence of a specific AI company using the Wayback Machine as the route.

For the wiki, the Wayback Machine anchors Public Web Archiving and Internet History Fragility. The source says it has helped journalists track removed or stealth-edited pages, including government pages, so blocking it can protect publishers from perceived AI leakage while weakening Public Service Journalism infrastructure.

Connections

• Internet Archive and Mark Graham - institutional home and director named in the episode.
• AI Proxy Scraping Risk and Archive Access Tradeoff - why publishers are blocking access.
• Digital Preservation, AI Journalism Trust, and Public Service Journalism - broader preservation and accountability-reporting branches.
• [[LibraryOfCongress|Library of Congress]] - smaller government archive model raised as an alternative.